Kodak’s Hidden History: Frankie Taylor Jones and the Black Appalachian Coal Camp Experience

By: Columnist and Scholar Dr. Emily Hudson

Name:                                   Frankie Taylor Jones         

Date of Birth:                       December 23, 1933                      

Place of Birth:                      Kodak, Kentucky

Date of Death:                    May 11, 2005

Parents:                                Frank and Cassie Taylor

Spouse:                                 Ralph Robert Jones, Sr.

PHOTO DESCRIPTION

Picture taken around 1944 in the Kodak, or Meem-Haskins Coal Camp. Pictured from right to left: Frankie Taylor (Jones), Charlene Jones, Emma Jean Hopkins, and Catherine Jones.

(From Billy and Deloris Jones collection)

I remember well the trips our family took to Kodak, Kentucky when I was a little girl to visit my Daddy’s brother who was a coal miner living in that community. It was always a day filled with adventure for my siblings and me. We looked forward to sailing paper-made boats down the creek, swinging across the creek on an old tire suspended from a rope tied to a branch far up in a tree, playing on the coal train cars, even when we knew better! It was always a treat to visit Uncle Ralph, Aunt Frankie and our cousins there in the coal camp.

Kodak, located near Vicco, Kentucky, was often referred to as Meem-Haskins when I was growing up. It is believed that Meem-Haskins was the last name of the owner of the coal company and was from Dayton, Ohio. According to my research, the Meem-Haskins Coal Company operated in Kodak from 1930 to 1955 and employed 150 workers.

I lived in Cleveland, Ohio in the early 80’s. For at least two summers I drove back home to Hazard and conducted oral history interviews from some of our elder members in the Black community, including Frankie Taylor Jones, Aunt Frankie. I sat down with her in 1983 to collect her story of growing up in Kodak, married life, and life as a coal-mining family. (Her interview is part of my larger article published in “Reshaping the Image of Appalachia”, edited by Loyal Jones, 1986, entitled “The Black American Family in Southeastern Kentucky: Red Fox, Kodak and Town Mountain”.) – Emily Jones Hudson

Frankie Taylor Jones shares her experience of going to school in the coal camp.

We had this one little, old-roomed school. Everybody went to school, and it was so full. Had one schoolteacher, we fought and scratched. We had John Willie Combs; he was teaching then. John Willie Combs taught me when I was in school. The school was a little old brown building... down the lower end, where the cemetery was, it set right there in that bottom.

Did Blacks and Whites go to school together?

No! The White kids had a school on down the road, they had different rooms. Their school wasn’t like our school, we had a little one-room shack.

Was there a name for the Blacks school?

No, didn’t have no name for it. Just Kodak Colored School is what everybody called it. Go up in the Colored holler is what they’d said. All the white people stayed on down below where we stayed. The White’s school, they had about five or six rooms. It was a big gray building on the left side of the road right before you get onto the dirt road going up into the holler. The bridge (right before the dirt road) separated the Blacks from the Whites.

Frankie Taylor Jones shares about family life.

Ralph’s mother (Mabel Allen Jones) taught Sunday school. Ralph’s family had chickens, cows, hogs... we didn’t have any of that... well, we had chickens.

How did Ralph’s family own so much?  I don’t know, I don’t know if Ralph’s father made more money or what, I don’t know. Ralph’s father, Will Jones, was a member of the Masons, if that had anything to do with it.

(Speaking about after marriage.) We had our own garden. We had our own hogs made our own lard. We didn’t have deep freezers, we carried water from a spring. There used to be a pump, but it broke so we used a well bucket and dropped it down there. The kids would go get water before going to school. Played football with milk cans, played Church.  

Ralph worked in the mines. Carl (Ralph’s brother) worked in the mines. Everybody worked in the mines but Billy (Ralph’s younger brother). But Billy was always building. He made all these little fancy chicken coops on the outside the house; they had an outside house, you know, where they stored all their hay for their stuff in the wintertime. Billy would build couches, but Carl and Ralph always worked in the mines. Ralph been in the mines before he went into the army. Ralph spent about three years in the army, then he went back in the mines.

Where the name “Meem-Haskin” came from?

Now I’m going to tell you what they told me. I don’t really know. But they said it was a man that owned all the land, and it was named after him. I don’t know whether it’s true or not. But that’s what they say, that’s where the company got its name from this man. And now they call it Kodak Coal Co. But we always got our mail in Kodak. Just the tipple and mines were mostly named after him, but the mail always came to Kodak. The houses and everything up in there belonged to the coal company. They just charged house rent. When they got their paycheck, the house, stores, everything belonged to the same company, they paid so much out of their paycheck. If it was $25, they took out $25 before they even got their check.

They sold the houses; we bought the house we stayed in, but they wouldn’t sell the land. That’s why everybody moved because they kept the land. I guess for coal and this kind of stuff, you know, and we paid $50 a year for the land the houses stood on. If you moved, you had to tear your house down (Ralph and Frankie moved out of Kodak- around 1972). There were only four houses left up there.

Was that all the Black families that lived up there?

Yeah me, Bobbi Jean, Winkie, Aunt ‘Dessa... all kin people.

There were no Black people who lived below the tipple?  Ms. Gussie stayed up on a little hill. The only reason we moved is because they (the coal company) wanted to truck the coal out of the holler. They were wanting to buy Ralph a trailer and set it down there in the flat on the side, but I said I wasn’t going to move down there. I liked it up there (the head of the holler in Kodak) because we could raise our own garden and stuff like that.

Did most of the white families live in trailers?

They had quite a few trailers but most of them, just like we did, owned the homes, but they didn’t own the land. Some of them are still like that up there. Their houses were better than ours; their houses, some were painted, they had nice porches, we didn’t have no big, beautiful houses, you know.

We had Church in the schoolhouse. Through the week was school and on Sunday was Church. We would get up and go to Sunday School and after that have 11:00 o’clock service, just like they do now. We used to have a preacher named Rev. Thomas, long time ago that lived on the camp, him and his wife. They were Baptist, we didn’t have nothing up there but Baptist, that’s all we knew.

Where did the White families go to church? They had their own church, you know where the bridge, where the store used to be up in the hollow? The other street that went the other way from the road that went up into the hollow, well they had church up there, they had a church house. It was quite a few more white people than black. They had a nice church.

Did you all (Black and White) have a hard time getting along?

We used to fight a lot, when we had to go to the store, we had to go down by the white camp to the commissary. Quite naturally they going to throw rocks at us and holler ‘nigger’ at us from their porch. But we used to fight all the time, the parents never bothered us, just the kids.

What kind of things could you get at the commissary?

Prices? They were cheap, we ‘drawed’ script, we didn’t trade with money. Like where Ralph worked at, they had an office that you put a script card in the window, and they’d give you maybe $25 or $30 and you take that in there and you can trade and get your groceries. They wasn’t high, you could buy clothes, we bought all our kid’s clothes at the commissary. They had groceries down one side then on the other side of the store, they had clothes, pants and other, you know, stuff like that. Not the good clothes like they wear now but back then they were pretty clothes. They were cheap, not high like they are now; you could buy cream for 8 cents a can.

Frankie Taylor Jones shares about the life of a miner in Kodak.

Did most of the Black miners who worked in the mines live in Kodak?

Some of them came up towards Breeding’s Creek, like John C. Clayton and his father. That was a long way to come, but they made pretty good money, and you could hardly find work unless you were working in the mines. So that’s why they came up there.

Did Black miners and White miners get along?

Ralph never had no problem. He said that one time he had this boss that was just bad to say nigger. When the big mines closed down- Kodak mines- they closed the commissary down. The mines that are up there now are not the same ones that were being worked during Ralphs daddy’s time. It’s not the same drift mine. The one Ralph and them worked in is closed in. When Ralph worked there, they had trains to come around, all that’s gone. They don’t have a drift mine now, they just take the coal up there and dump it into the tipple. Back then Ralph and them would hand-load cars with shovels. Been over 20-30 years since they closed Meem-Haskins mines. Other mines had contracts with the tipple and continued to truck coal to the tipple augar mines.

Ralph switched to night watching when the mine closed down. There were picketers, all the little tipples were picketing. They didn’t want anyone working the tipples. They were blowing up the tipples, they weren’t getting the price on coal they wanted. They didn’t want no trucks to come in. They blowed up the tipple and coal trucks. One night Ralph was night watching, the picketers came up and ran him off. They dynamite the tipple, and it burned and burned for a long time. Approximately 20 years ago, in the 60’s, they rebuilt the tipple. The mines even tore up the tracks, blowed them up, to keep coal from being bought in. Some of the mines were unrecognized. Some of them weren’t unrecognized; that is what they (the mines) were mad about. They set up there and let the contract run out. They wouldn’t sign it for a pretty good while and maybe they would just take in non-union coal. The union men that got paid good money, they would get mad and wouldn’t let ‘em bring this coal in like that. It was the union men that was picketing. Ralph was in the union, sometimes when they (the mines) come out picketing, they wouldn’t let them work for three or four months. Times really got hard.  

(“Times really got hard.” I can clearly remember how during those hard times, Billy Jones, my dad and Ralph’s brother, would grocery shop in Hazard and deliver those groceries to Ralph’s family in Kodak. Week after week until the mining dispute was settled.)

Here is a poem inspired by my childhood visits to my Uncle Ralph and Aunt Frankie’s home in Kodak, Kentucky. The trips were usually on a Sunday afternoon and that meant sitting down at a supper table prepared by Aunt Frankie.

AUNT FRANKIE’S TABLE

Kodak is filled with colorful memories
Sunday supper at Uncle Ralph’s
Coal wasn’t the only goal
A seat at Aunt Frankie’s table
Was the mouth-watering prize
Fried chicken fit for a king
Every part of that bird eaten
Including the liver, gizzard, and wing
Tomatoes so fresh they bled red
A mountain of mashed potatoes
Buttered from top to bottom
Sprinkled religiously with salt and pepper
Green beans snapped the night before
Seasoned with fatback
Cornbread fried brown in the skillet
A mean side of collard greens
Corn on the cob
Apple cobbler and fresh-squeezed lemonade
It was an honor to have a seat and feast
At Aunt Frankie’s table
On a Sunday afternoon
(Published in HOME, A Collection of Poetic Thoughts and Things, 2024)

Hair, Numbers, And History

By: DAVID S. ROTENSTEIN

Dolores Slater-numbers book.tif: Dolores Slater holds her mother’s last numbers book. The final entries were made in the summer of 1960s, shortly before Louise Harris died. Photo by David S. Rotenstein.

Michelle Slater loves history. That’s a good thing because her family’s story is woven into Pittsburgh’s Hill District’s history about as tightly as possible. Slater’s grandmother wrote numbers for some of Steel City’s best-known numbers bankers. Her father cut hair and eventually ran the Crystal Barbershop, one of the Hill’s most iconic third places and Black-owned businesses. Slater, 58, learned the hair trade by watching her father and she eventually became a licensed barber herself. That’s right, not a hairstylist, a barber. One wall inside her shop is dedicated to telling her family and community’s stories. There’s a lot to unpack inside Slater’s shop and her stories.

I met Slater while researching the social history of numbers gambling in Pittsburgh. Her father, Harold Slater (1924-2014), had cut the hair of a gregarious and well-loved numbers banker and nightclub owner, George “Crip” Barron (1924-2001). On Saturdays, Barron spent time with Angela James, whom he treated like a daughter. Barron would drop Angela off at the Hurricane bar next door to the Crystal Barbershop, where she would drink Shirley Temples while he tended to business and his hair. After I interviewed Angela James for the first time in January 2021, she connected me to Michelle Slater.

Before I get into Slater’s story, it’s important to underscore the significance of the two intersecting traditions that dominate it: numbers gambling and barbering. Invented in Harlem in the first decades of the twentieth century, numbers gambling was a street lottery that formed the economic engine sustaining many twentieth-century urban, rural, and suburban Black communities. The game enabled multitudes of small bettors to wager pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters on three-digit numbers derived from financial market returns published in daily newspapers. 

Deeply embedded in blues songs, African American literature, and oral tradition, numbers gambling employed thousands of African Americans and European immigrants in communities with high barriers to good jobs rooted in anti-Black racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Catholicism. Runners, writers, and counting house employees worked for bankers who often became folk heroes: badmen who broke the rules and laws while also capitalizing Black businesses and providing economic support for people who lacked access to banking, insurance, and philanthropy.

Hair businesses — beauty salons and barbershops — were another pillar in Black social and economic networks. Inside these Black spaces, proprietors, patrons, and loafers told stories, swapped jokes, and did business — not all of it involved cutting hair and shaving. Writer Melissa Harris-Perry once described Black barbershops and beauty parlors as safe spaces where members of the Black community could speak and act freely, places “where nothing is out of bounds for conversation and where the ‘serious work of figuring it out’ goes on.”

Most hair businesses were — and are — gender-specialized: barbers cut men’s hair, and stylists cut women’s hair. The boundaries were rigid, but not impermeable. Like newsstands, bars, and other businesses with lots of foot traffic where folks tended to linger, barbershops and salons frequently fronted for profitable numbers racketeers. Folks could buy a number while also paying for tonsorial services.

William “Woogie” Harris opened his Crystal Barbershop in the 1920s. Harris and his friend and partner William “Gus” Greenlee became two of Pittsburgh’s most beloved and wealthy Black businessmen. Bootlegging and numbers gambling provided the capital for their successful enterprises. Greenlee’s nightclubs, restaurants, and Negro Leagues baseball team, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, and Harris’s barbershop provided them legitimate fronts and ways to launder racketeering money. It was a sublime Black space.

Harold Slater’s family arrived in Pittsburgh during the Great Migration. The men in his family had worked in barbering for a couple of generations back in Luray, Virginia, before moving up north. In Pittsburgh, they worked as Pullman porters and as barbers.

Michelle Slater’s grandmother, Louise Harris (no blood relation to Woogie Harris), also arrived in Pittsburgh during the Great Migration. Her family came to the city from Florida by way of Alabama and Georgia. Louise was barely 16 when she had her daughter, Dolores, Michelle’s mother. Louise’s grandparents ended up raising Dolores.

The Slater, Harris, Barron, and James families’ Pittsburgh timelines began intersecting in the 1920s. Louise Harris was working in Hill District restaurants when she struck up a relationship with Woogie Harris’s older brother, George. The pair lived together for about 12 years and they wrote numbers for Woogie. After a violent breakup in the early 1940s, Louise met another man, also in the numbers: Charles “Snotty” Lewis. They married in 1948 and split four years later. After Louise died in 1960, Charles Lewis married Eldora James, Angela James’s mother.

Yes, it’s complicated.

Harold Slater enlisted in the army during World War II. He served as an airplane mechanic with the Tuskegee Airmen. Though he didn’t fly the planes, he kept them in the air earning himself an honored position in the Western Pennsylvania Tuskegee Airmen Memorial installed inside Pittsburgh International Airport’s Concourse A.

After the war, Harold went to work in the Crystal Barbershop. In 1951, he married Woogie and Ada Harris’s daughter, Marion. The couple lived in the Harris’s spacious Victorian home known throughout Black Pittsburgh as the “Mystery Manor”; historic preservationists later dubbed it the National Negro Opera Company house for its brief time in the 1940s as the pioneering arts company’s headquarters.

Married and divorced once before, Marion was a free spirit and the marriage to Slater ended in divorce in 1958. By then, both had begun relationships with other people. Less than a month after an Allegheny County court issued the divorce decree, Harold married Dolores; their first daughter was born soon after that. Michelle came along five years later, in 1963.

Despite his divorce from Woogie’s daughter, Harold Slater remained close to Woogie and he continued working at the Crystal Barbershop. After Woogie died in 1967, Slater became the shop’s proprietor. He ran it until the 1980s when the city’s urban renewal machine caught up to the block.

At 93, Dolores Slater lives in a home that is less than 500 feet from the Crystal Barbershop’s final location, the block where it moved in the 1950s after urban renewal displaced it. “All my life,” is how long she says she has lived in the Hill. “I was born here and in fact I only moved one time. I moved to Homewood for one month and then I moved back. I love the Hill.” 

The city used eminent domain to take her family’s home in 1980. “We lived across the street from the Crystal Barbershop,” she recalled. “So they wanted me to move out and I wouldn’t move out until — I told them till they found something on the Hill for me.” 

Dolores worked for U.S. Steel and for Pittsburgh Public Schools. After her mother died, Dolores wrapped up her mother’s numbers business. A few years later, while pregnant with Michelle, she briefly worked at a Hill District “numbers station.” Her life story weaves in and out of the narrative that made Pitsburgh’s Hill District one of the nation’s most recognizable Black neighborhoods.

All of this history converges in Michelle Slater’s one-chair Pittsburgh shop. “I’m a barber-stylist,” Slater explained in July 2021. “I love it and when people post things or see me and they always tell me, ‘Your dad would be so proud of you.’”

Slater worked in several jobs after attending the University of Pittsburgh. She still works as a casino regulatory officer when not in her shop. Barbering, however, is in her soul and it’s the work she loves, along with talking about her family’s history. When she opened her own barbershop, Slater called it The Crystal Barber to honor her father.

“I’m big historian. In my house, I have another gallery … I just believe in old pictures and family and our family is rich — I mean we’re rich with history,” she explained standing in front of family photos and artifacts from her father’s barbershop, including his shaving cup, electric clippers, and his Associated Master Barbers of America membership plaque (member number 33213). She calls the space her “ancestry wall.” It includes one photo that she calls “Generations.” Shot in the Hill District outside the family home, it shows her great-great-grandmother, great-grandmother, grandmother Louise Harris, mother Dolores Slater, and older sister, Kim.

Many of Slater’s pictures aren’t ordinary family snapshots. The family’s close ties to the Harrises meant that their lives were documented by Charles “Teenie” Harris, George and Woogie’s youngest brother, who was best known as a renowned Pittsburgh Courier photographer. His photographs chronicled Black life in Pittsburgh for more than half a century.

“This is our hustle,” says Michelle Slater. “This is what we do. My mother never wanted to leave the Hill.” Her whole family’s history is bound up with the Hill District’s history: the barbershops, numbers, and displacement. Yet, because of the stigma attached to urban renewal and the poverty induced by segregation, the Hill’s history is a lot like Black History Month: a tokenized and separate narrative. “The Hill District may have a bad name and nobody wants to reach back and see what the beauty of it all was in the beginning,” Michelle explains. “And so they put it to the back burner until someone wants to come and build something and it’s more commercial and industrial, but nobody’s reaching back for the history of it.”

I asked Michelle how she learns Pittsburgh’s Black history and her family’s role in it. “I wouldn’t know where to go,” she replied. “Like the only things we have are the Teenie Harris pictures.” A 2011 book documenting Teenie Harris’s career simply mentioned her grandmother in an endnote as George Harris’s “common-law wife.” Harold Slater’s name and time in the Harris family is absent from the 2007 City of Pittsburgh historic landmark nomination for the home he shared with Marion Harris Slater and her married name was misspelled. Like Black history throughout the United States, much of the Slaters’ story has been erased and forgotten. Though there are Black historians documenting Pittsburgh’s past, their work is built on a foundation laid by decades of Black history produced by whites. Big names and big men like Woogie Harris and Gus Greenlee have become tokens of a rich Black past once defined by people like Louise Harris and Harold Slater and Dolores Slater.